Posts Tagged ‘office supplies’

My rubber thumb

Posted February 24, 2012 by
in Cabinet of Curiosities | 5 comments »

Meet my new favorite office supply: a strange, spongy rubber thumb cap I found at a client’s office. It’s covered in little raised dots and has a few air holes on one side, perhaps so you don’t overheat. At any rate, the intended use seems to be for flipping through stacks of paper or leafing through a book and preventing the pages from sticking together. I gather the official name is a thimblette.

Frankly, it’s nothing that a licked finger couldn’t also accomplish, but it’s a fun object to idly squish and squeeze and play around with, and it doesn’t take up much space in my drawer.

Have you ever used one?

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What’s on your office supply wish list?

Posted November 11, 2011 by
in Cabinet of Curiosities, Editorial, Planning Tips | 1 comment »

Some office supplies I need — pens, notebooks, file folders. Others I merely covet. Into this category fall any number of ingenious organizing devices, from the freestanding elastic band organizer I use to store unfiled receipts to the hanging folders I’ve pinned against the wall.

Of course, it can be difficult to judge whether something will really make a difference in my life, or whether I’m merely using its utility to justify the desire. Nonetheless, it’s always fun to dream, so I thought I’d ask: what’s on your office supply wish list?

I’ll go first… On the low end, I’ve long admired these snazzy magnetic desk dots. On the high end, I’m thinking about a wall-mounted magazine storage rack, but I haven’t found one that’s quite right.

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Fun with shredder scissors

Posted August 10, 2010 by
in Cabinet of Curiosities, Planning Tips | 3 comments »

Welcome to my new favorite office supply: shredder scissors.

I had no idea such a thing even existed until I went to the MoMA store to pick up a Muji file box and saw this pair among the desk accessories. In the end, I opted for a cheaper model on Amazon, and I am very happy with the purchase.

The idea is pretty straightforward — there are 5 parallel blades that cut thin strips as you close the scissors.

Obviously, it’s not something you’d want to use to shred a 60-page document. But it’s absolutely ideal for shredding things like credit card solicitations and whatever other scraps of paper you want to keep private. (Which is great if, like me, you’ve chucked your big electric shredder deep into your basement since it takes up too much space in your office.)

I imagine there are also plenty of crafting applications if you wanted to fringe the edge of a card, or even make your own confetti.

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DIY with DCP

Posted March 1, 2010 by
in Pens, Paper & People | 3 comments »

Karen sent me a few sheets of Clairefontaine DCP paper in the fall. DCP (which stands for “Digital Color Printing”) is a thick, white, glossy, A4 printer paper, and it’s apparently designed for printing photographs and other color graphics. It comes in ivory, too, and can also be used, Karen told me, for bookmaking.

I don’t have a color printer, and I haven’t tried to make a book since the 3rd or 4th grade. Frankly, I found the A4 size a little awkward at first, since it’s thinner and longer than standard American paper and didn’t really fit into any of my binders. So I stuck it in a folder and forgot about it until this weekend, when I needed to customize an old tea box for a present and didn’t have time to go out and get the proper supplies.

DCP, it turned out, was just the thing for the job. I wanted something I could write on (so decoupage was out), but I also needed paper that was thick enough to hide the images on the box I was reusing:

Continue reading »

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Pointy paper clips

Posted December 30, 2009 by
in Pens, Paper & People | 4 comments »

briefklammern

I picked up a box of paperclips last week in Germany; for no good reason other than aesthetics—and a dash of nostalgia for the time I used to live there—I prefer their pointy tips to the rounded versions that are standard in the US.

It’s a funny thing, nostalgia. Obviously, that period of my life was much richer than a simple office product, and I don’t have any specific memories associated with paperclips in particular. But I still find comfort in the quotidian reminder of a thoroughly mundane object, something I can integrate into my everyday routine and think about more frequently than I would, say, look at my photo album, or reread the fragmentary journal that I kept back then. It’s a more meaningful relationship, I guess. And now that I’ve replenished my supply, I can use them with abandon, and without fear of running out anytime soon!

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